3 Steps on How to Improve your Sales Growth Strategy & Fast-Track your Mergers & Acquisitions (Part 2)
In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I’m often surprised that business leaders don’t recognize one critical area during their due diligence phase – ensuring that the right salespeople will be in the right seats. To read Part 1, go here.
Are you in the midst of a merger & acquisition transaction? Or, reorganizing your sales team to improve sales performance?
As a revenue growth specialist, I see impatient CEOs searching for that “magical silver bullet” to improve their sales teams’ performance. I hear things like:
- Let’s put in a new sales process.
- Let’s train our salespeople on better sales skills.
- Let’s reorganize and break up sales roles.
- Let’s buy a new sales automation system.
It’s almost always disappointing. None of these “good” suggestions delivers the hoped-for sales growth results.
What can you do to ensure that the respective sales teams of your M&A transaction will work together synergistically so you have a fast start?
In my previous article, we discussed 3 steps to guide the evaluation of your sales strategy and growth opportunities in a potential merger or acquisition. These steps included:
- Asking important questions before you make drastic changes.
- Doing a “Dig-Deeper” Assessment of your salespeople.
- Uncovering your salespeople’s unique sales DNA.
Here are 3 additional steps to take as you reorganize your sales team so they will exceed your revenue and margin growth targets.
Seek Actionable Insights to Set Salespeople up for Success
Salespeople need to be placed in a role where they can have the most success. Understanding what each salesperson is able to contribute, will guide you in reorganizing your sales team and impacting your future success. Often, we don’t need new salespeople. We need to take our existing people and put them in roles they are wired for. Thus, we need critical information so we can harness the existing strengths from our sales teams to set them up for success.
The most effective way to gain this knowledge is to do a Sales Audit of each sales force and sale team. You get concrete, objective, actionable, data-driven insights to speed the accuracy of your decision making. The question is, do you know where to start?
Do a Sales Audit using a Sales-Specific Tool
For any areas of your sales growth strategy that you’re going to evaluate, you’ll need objective data. But here’s a word of warning. When choosing to gather insights on your team’s sales capabilities, you need to go deeper than a personality assessment. As an Objective Management Group fan, I have successfully used their Sales Auditing process for years. It works, because it measures sales-specific capabilities, has configurations for all of the various sales roles, and further customizes those configurations for the specific business, market, competition and decision maker to be called or visited. Its recommendations are extremely accurate and it even identifies the mysteries that could cause an otherwise average salesperson to improve their sales performance to the extent that they exceed their targets.
Assess Selling Mindsets before the M & A Transaction
From personal experience, I know that it’s extremely difficult to transform salespeople from price-sellers into high-value sellers. One of my clients was eager to expand his market share. As a high-value provider, he purchased a company, hoping he’ll be able to deliver the same kind of service. However, in assessing the sales staff after the purchase, he realized that only half of the sales staff had the mindset required for selling high value.
During the M&A process, sales leaders often think that a larger product line and stronger support system would be enough to reverse flat revenues. That’s not always true. You need to have the right salespeople in the right seats to realize your growth goals.
Knowing what sales capabilities you need for your business to grow is an important part of your analysis process. The demand for salespeople who are able to execute inside sales might replace the need for a hunter. A good consultative seller could add enough value to the prospect’s business and the buying process so that great closing skills aren’t required. The competencies of an inside salesperson, hunter, closer, consultative seller and even account manager are vastly different, so it is imperative to define and measure them.
Summary
Get a fast-start on your M & A transaction. Get actionable intel analysis of each salesperson and identify the role/roles for which they are best suited. In doing this, you will be able to effectively reorganize your sales teams during the due diligence phase and ensure that you have the right salespeople in the right seats.
Leadership Lesson: Obtain concrete, actionable data when examining the sales capabilities of a potential acquisition candidate and dig deep and wide.
Leadership Question: What steps do you need to take to ensure you have the right salespeople in the right roles?
© Copyright 2018 Danita Bye
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